


Polaroids and Salt Pillars and Other Accidents of Design

by Princip1914



Series: Summer of 1969 Road Trip [2]
Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Angst, He/Him Pronouns For Aziraphale (Good Omens), Implied Oral Sex, M/M, Melancholy, Other, he/him and she/her pronouns for Crowley, hell is real, implied vulva for Aziraphale, joshua tree, ruin, schlocky tourist destinations but make it sad, summer of 1969 road trip across America, the Salton Sea - Freeform, the real MVP of this series is desert/water metaphors, yet another Colorado river cameo
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-11
Updated: 2020-05-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:48:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,599
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24131596
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Princip1914/pseuds/Princip1914
Summary: There was something about the polaroid which theybothliked, although neither would have said. The immediacy of it. The fact that there were no negatives to worry about misplacing, to agonize over destroying later. (To destroy a set of negatives would be to admit that they were doing something Wrong, and they were, Aziraphale reminded himself, doing nothing Wrong). Although they did not discuss it, Aziraphale thought they both liked the look of it too, the glances strangers gave them when Aziraphale saidturn a little to the right darling, your profile is so handsome, when Crowley’s face split into a lopsided, rare half-smile for the camera and he did as he was told.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Series: Summer of 1969 Road Trip [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1741231
Comments: 53
Kudos: 75





	Polaroids and Salt Pillars and Other Accidents of Design

**Author's Note:**

> This is a follow up to my previous summer of 1969 road trip ficlet, Love and Longing in the Only Tim Horton’s in Kentucky. I think it will make sense without reading that one, but do check it out if you want more context!

Aziraphale bought a polaroid camera in Burbank. It was, as Crowley delightedly pointed out, the first piece of modern technology Aziraphale had shown any interest in since the invention of the printing press. 

Crowley had brought three cameras of his own, including one model that hadn’t been invented yet, but they stayed packed away in his bags. It seemed he preferred Aziraphale’s hand on the shutter. (If it also seemed, in the days that followed, that Crowley preferred Aziraphale’s hand in other locations, they did not discuss it.)

There was something about the polaroid which they _both_ liked, although neither would have said. The immediacy of it. The fact that there were no negatives to worry about misplacing, to agonize over destroying later. (To destroy a set of negatives would be to admit that they were doing something Wrong, and they were, Aziraphale reminded himself, doing nothing Wrong). Although they did not discuss it, Aziraphale thought they both liked the look of it too, the glances strangers gave them when Aziraphale said _turn a little to the right darling, your profile is so handsome_ , when Crowley’s face split into a lopsided, rare half-smile for the camera and he did as he was told. 

***

Crowley especially liked the large billboards that dotted the highway and warned of Hellfire to come if sinners did not repent. He liked to have his picture taken with them. Before they had even crossed California, Aziraphale had begun a collection.

ACCEPT JESUS OR SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES 

Crowley, laughing, looking up at the sign, sunglasses off, hair long in the dusty desert wind.

HELL IS WAITING. YOUR TIME IS UP

Crowley in the foreground pointing meaningfully to his sleek, expensive watch.

HELL IS REAL 

Crowley, after the photograph was taken, sliding back into the leather driver’s seat. “Can’t argue with that angel, true and to the point.” 

THE END IS COMING. WHERE ARE YOU HEADED?

This was not a question that Aziraphale wanted to ask. It was not a question either of them was willing to answer. But it was the photograph Aziraphale would like best in the years that followed, the one that would have lived, creased and worn, in the folds of Aziraphale’s wallet, if he were the kind of man to have a wallet. As it was, Aziraphale was not a man, and when he needed money, which was not often, he carried a pocketbook. In the picture, Crowley was barely smiling, but his face was radiant, filled with a wondrous sort of joy. His expression was not yet tinged with anticipated loss, as all of Crowley’s smiles were in the days that followed. 

(“Pull over,” Aziraphale said. They had been in America for less than twenty four hours.

The desert hummed around them with the buzzing of insects. All the flowers were in bloom even though it was the wrong time of year for it. In the following decades, this patch of sandy gravel, rock, and twisted cacti would become Joshua Tree National Park. 

Aziraphale took Crowley’s sunglasses off and leaned in, pressed their lips together for the very first time as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Crowley kissed him back for the very first time, sure and gentle, as if they had been doing this for a thousand years. 

They separated. Crowley’s hands flexed minutely on the steering wheel. Aziraphale stared at the road ahead where a water mirage glinted in the distance.

“Go on then,” he said.

Crowley turned the key, ignition loud and startling in the calm of the desert. 

Around the next bend was the sign, paint peeling in the desert heat. WHERE ARE YOU HEADED?

“Take a picture of me angel?” Crowley asked.) 

***

It went like this. From Joshua Tree to the Salton Sea. From the Salton Sea to the Grand Canyon. From the Grand Canyon to the plains of Nebraska, to Iowa to Ohio, then south along the Appalacians. It was not a road trip, because Angels and Demons do not go on holiday together. It was not a road trip because it had no itinerary, no fixed map, no idea of when or where it would end. 

(It would end in Kentucky, in a motel where the air conditioner droned loud enough that Crowley could pretend not to hear the hitch in Aziraphale’s breath when they found the note in Gabriel’s neat script on the desk, where Aziraphale could pack his things on the bed and pretend not to hear Crowley crying in the bathroom.) 

***

“Would you like a picture together?” a man asked early in their trip, a kind and knowing look in his eye. They were at Bombay Beach, by the Salton Sea. The man’s traveling companion, broad-shouldered and younger than he was, was waiting in line in the hot sun for two ice cream cones. It was a day after they had kissed in the desert, only hours after they had made love for the first time, although, of course, it would be many years before Aziraphale allowed himself to call it that. Crowley’s hair was still mussed from Aziraphale’s fingers. 

“Oh, we couldn’t possibly,” Aziraphale said, but handed over the camera all the same, allowed himself to be shuffled next to Crowley, leaned in to the weight of Crowley’s arm draped tentatively around his shoulders.

(The bedspread had smelled of chlorine when Crowley pressed Aziraphale down on it. The breeze blowing in the window smelled of saltwater, incongruously, so many miles inland. As Crowley's mouth traveled lower, Aziraphale thought of this accidental sea lapping at the shore below their window, an unintended consequence of engineering, a bend of the river cut off from its origin and destination, transformed into something else new and wonderful and entirely different. The river had not asked to be a sea. It had not wanted it. It was not part of the plan, and yet here it was, impossible and miraculous rising out of the desert like a dream.)

All around them, beachgoers were laughing in bright colored swimwear. Yachts bobbed at the end of the dock. The sun warmed wood was rough under Aziraphale's bare feet. The smell of grilled cheese drifted over from a garishly colored eatery. Aziraphale thought Crowley might suggest a movie at the drive-in later that evening; Aziraphale thought he might say yes. Crowley’s arm tightened imperceptibly around his shoulders. 

(In the motel that first night, Crowley bent his head, drank down the salt taste of the sea from where it flowed, ancient and sparking with the energy of the divine. As Aziraphale twisted his hands in Crowley's hair, Crowley thought of a river thrown wide by an engineering error, of a desert that had gone six thousand years without expecting this sudden influx of water, the accidental effect of a grand design, and he drank and he drank and he drank while the angel shuddered silently above him.)

“Smile,” said the man, snapping the picture. 

Aziraphale kept this polaroid with the others in the bottom drawer of the desk in the bookshop, but he could not bear to look at it later. There was something in the sly cock of Crowley’s hip, the possessive curl of his arm, as if the owner of that arm and that hip knew, for perhaps the first time in six thousand years, that he was wanted. Looking at it made Aziraphale wonder if he had done something wrong by doing nothing Wrong. 

“Take another?” Crowley asked almost shyly. “One for each of us?” 

Crowley was not a man either, but he did a have a wallet, a sleek leather thing. He did not keep the photograph there, although he wanted to, because he knew there were some things even more dangerous than the contents of a certain tartan thermos. He kept it in his nightstand, in a folder marked "taxes" to throw Hell off the scent. Crowley never paid his taxes on principle, but the edges of the folder were tattered and worn from touch.

***

Aziraphale returned to California once before the end of the world. He didn’t, strictly, need to, but there was a rare book auction in Palm Springs and he had accrued far more than a week’s worth of time off in six years of service at the Dowling estate. He flew the human way. As he sat cramped in a metal tube far above the Atlantic, he tried not to think of Crowley, picking her way across the lawn in kitten heels to wave him off, tried not to think of her melancholy smile as she assured him she would look after the garden while he was gone. 

In Palm Springs, after allowing the Huntington Library representative to outbid him at the auction, Aziraphale took a cab not to the airport, as he ought to have done, but to Bombay Beach, more than an hour in the wrong direction. There was almost nothing left of it now. Cars the age of the Bentley rusted in the old drive-in theater. The sea had receded like a mirage. The air smelled of dying things. It reminded Aziraphale of Sodom and Gomorrah after Sandalphon was through with it.

"Hey," the driver shouted from the open window of his idling cab. "Hey, are you sure this is the place you were looking for? Doesn't feel right, leaving you here."

Aziraphale took one last look at the dock, dry-rotted and broken, stretching out into an endless plain of mud and salt. 

"No," he said, turning back to the cab. "I’m afraid it's not what I was looking for at all."

**Author's Note:**

> I never expected to write a follow up to the Tim Hortons fic, but 2020 is a weird year and here we are. It’s part of a series and there’s going to be three. Stay tuned. 
> 
> Also, I feel like I should add for those of you who don't know, the Salton Sea is a real place, which was created when a project to divert the Colorado River for farming in 1905 accidentally flooded a desert valley. In the 50s and 60s, it was a popular tourist destination and towns like Bombay Beach popped up to cater to the crowds. Then the sea, which has no natural inflow of water, started to dry up. Bombay Beach is a ghost town now far from the water and the "sea" is a shallow salt marsh in the desert. But migrating birds love it! 
> 
> [Come say hi on tumblr!](https://princip1914.tumblr.com)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * ["Take a picture of me, angel?"](https://archiveofourown.org/works/24477463) by [Nymphalis_antiopa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nymphalis_antiopa/pseuds/Nymphalis_antiopa)




End file.
